5 Autumn Golden leaves high up in the tree!

Another year... another season.. And this is actually my favourite season (I think): Autumn time!! I love the colours, I love the themes.. So I re-introduced all the bits and pieces I use to decorate our classroom every year:

our autumn tree

The Hundreds Languages of Fabric

Two years ago, we have introduced the Reggio Emilia approach into our classroom and our curriculum. I didn't really know if it would work.. It has! Don't get me wrong, I am still learning and there are many errors along the way. Things I thought would be a great hit among the children turned out to be an "epic failure" (as my own children would say!). Activities that never really appealed to me became so so popular... It has left me baffled at times. The main thing is not to have any preconceived idea, I guess. Try everything and you will eventually get there. 
What I can say now, is that you will notice centres of interest. And I assume that these interests will differ or evolve from year to year as new groups of children pass through your door or as children grow older (never a dull moment in teaching!). So far, thanks to the Reggio inspired teaching method we are using, two interests have emerged from the children, one being a serious love of glue and the other being an equally intense love for fabric. I took these two interests and planned possibilities and provocations.

Children have developed new skills since September and used many different media to communicate their understandings of the world around them, their emotions etc.. As an adult, we may not always get "it". I often see Mams winking at me when their child show them proudly the "blob" they painted earlier on. Mams may ask "what is it honey?". And the child gets frustrated and sighs, explaining what he tried to convey on paper. I taught many parents to comment on the composition of the painting or the colours used when they are not sure what it is representing. The child usually automatically forwards a clue of what it is but his feelings have been saved and he/ she feels valued by the praise they received. Children are quite good at using many "languages" to express themselves. The possibilities for dialogue are endless then, as long as we (teachers and parents) provide them with appropriate tools and means. And I believe that it is my privilege as an early years teacher to support the children who come through my door in discovering, appreciating and mastering the different "languages" available to express themselves and convey their ideas. 

Geometry in Art & Craft

  

In our classroom, children regularly use the Montessori Constructive Triangles Boxes. These boxes contain various triangles of different colours and they are used to form plane figures. They help children to refine the discrimination of geometric form and prepares them for geometry. I wrote a great post a few years ago about geometry and you can check it out right here if you re interested in knowing more about how children learn about shapes in our setting.

Christmas messy dough

Why should children enjoy messy (also known as sensory) play? Well scientific research shows that the brain is stimulated through movement and the senses. To ensure the circuit of a child's brain reaches its full potential, then sensory experiences are vital. So we did get messy! We made salt dough together (messy, gooey!!!). And the children shaped the dough into little gingerbread men.

2) Life cycle: from seed to sunflower - craft

To complement out study on seeds and plants (see previous post on "1-Life cycle: from seed to sunflower" ), the children got to decorate a small cardboard box with seeds and beans. It's a simple craft which they truly enjoyed as they could choose the shape of the box, the seeds, which colour they were going to use etc... They all thought about what they were going to use the boxes for. Sweets, hair clips, rings, stones, seeds etc... What would you use yours for?

Making Bath Salts for Mother's day

Art and craft must be meaningful to the children and meaningful in term of learning. Each craft is usually related to the current theme or topic. This week, as we prepared for Mother's Day, I thought of making salt baths with the children. I gathered all the ingredients necessary for it : Epsom salts, sea salts, baking soda, food colouring and essential oils (orange mandarin).

Winter activities on our shelves...

I nearly forgot to show you all about the bits and pieces kids have been doing in the classroom in relation to our winter theme. It hasn't stopped! I usually find January quite long, bleak and monotonous. But January 2014 has been different so far!

Christmas spirit....

I can smell it in the air. Christmas is upon us! Can you smell it too? The children at preschool surely can.. Here are a few things we have started doing in our classroom in anticipation of the big day!


A countdown to Christmas.. just a cardboard circle with wooden pegs.. We take a peg each day to see how many "sleeps" are left before Santa comes..

 

 

I made another batch of play dough and added red food colouring and cinnamon to make it a bit more festive. It also ads to the sensorial teachings in our classroom. I picked a few Christmas cake decorations to the try and voila! Kids loved it.. we have had so many variations of Christmas cakes since I introduced the activity to the shelves!

 

 

 

 

We started making Christmas decorations too.. cardboard and waving. Nice results! 

 

 

 

This year, we also made paper chain.. I had never done that with the children before but they were well able to do it and worked very hard to make their chain as long as possible. 

 





 

 

Of course, this is only the beginning. So stay tuned to see more...

Gosh, I do love Autum time!

Autumn time is really here. Here are a few self-explanatory pictures to show you what is going on in our classroom at the moment to celebrate Autumn. 

• Learning about acorns:

using seeds to fill in the template

 

 

• Our Autumn Table interest:

 

 

the Root Children

 

• Halloween decorations

 

 

 

 

More ideas to come for Halloween .. Keep in touch! I hope you like it so far..

 

 





Play Dough Fun

I heard one mother the other day talking about how she has never encouraged her children to play with play dough in their house because she said she simply could not cope with MESS!! 

The Little Red Hen

If you have read my last post (here), you know how strong I feel about fairy tales. So, two weeks ago, we started reading the Little Red Hen as its moral teaching coincides with what we are working on with the children this September: work ethics, personal initiative, responsibility and cooperation and much much more.

Expanding the lessons of the Kissing Hand

One of the books I like to use at the beginning of a school year is the Kissing Hand. It's about a little raccoon Chester who doesn't want to leave his mother to go to school.

Planning our 1st provocation

We talked about how we wanted students to interact with our classroom. We didn’t want them to come in and know every day what the block area or the writing centre for instance contained . I want the children to arrive in class and wonder what they will come up with in each centre. the environment must be dynamic and evolve on a regular routine. Don't you agree that thanks to such a classroom, the children's interest and curiosity will grow?  I have never put all the materials out at the beginning of the year. I gradually add, remove etc.. depending on the children's learning pace and their interests too. This is another aspect of creating a dynamic teaching environment.  I have learnt that each year bring us a "bunch" of different kids who love doing things completely different than the past pupils. What Reggio teachers often do as well is add a new game/toy/apparatus etc.. and let the children discover it themselves.

From what I have studied so far, one of the most important concepts of the Reggio Emilia Approach is the "provocation".   What I understand (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that a provocation could be an image, an object, a group of images or a group of objects. It could be a sound, a series of sounds, a piece of music. It could also be any event or experience that leads to more discussion, curiosity, excitement...  Provocations can be pre-planned, structured and arranged while some of them are more open-ended.

So, I have been re-thinking activities in our classroom. I want them to be about exploration and discovery through their senses. I want the activities to prompt the children  to ask more questions, to plan and to think deeply. To do so, I have to observe what the children are interested in or at least guess. I have to take into consideration what they already know and then plan the activity.

 

 

Here is the 1st provocation I set up. I had noticed the children looking at themselves in the various mirrors in the classroom. They have also been quite drawn to the writing centre to colour. I assumed that exploring a new art medium would be a great idea and I presented a mirror in the writing centre. I sat at the table beside a child and observed. It didn't take the child very long to start making faces in the mirror and start laughing saying : "look, this is another me and it is doing all what I am doing!".. So I prompted the child a bit further and asked him to describe himself. When he said he had brown eyes, I asked him if we had the same colour in our crayons basket. When he said he had dark yellow hair, I repeated the question. We moved on to the skin and the lips colour. Finally, I asked him what shape was his face? His eyes? His mouth? And the rest followed:

 

And funny enough, once we were finished, we had a group of children waiting for their turn to "draw themselves"!! Brilliant!

 

At circle time, I reinforce the concept of identity and we talked with the children about how there are things about each of them that are the same and there are things about each of them that are different. We had all the preschoolers with blond hair to stand up ,all preschoolers who have brown eyes to stand up. And we also read:

• I'm Glad to be Me by P.K. Hallinan
• I Know What I Like by Norma Simon

As we part for our Easter break...

Needless to say that this week was filled with excitment as Easter is nearly at our door. The children were full of beans, a bit noisier than usual and I have to say that they were finding it hard to concentrate on anything at all. This is why I more or less drop all on-going lessons and concentrated on fun arts and crafts.

 

First, we painted chicks with a potatoe (this surely intrigued the children at first).

 

 

Then we repeated the activity we did last year: we used colourful buttons to fill in the template  of an easter egg:

 

 

Finally, we made our Easter baskets. First I drew the templates of bunnies on card paper. I got the kids to use their fingertips to dot the template. I then added the goggly eyes and drew the bunnies' whiskers and noses. The rest was up to me. It took me nearly 2 hours to make the baskets (using card paper) and stapple the dotted templates to the front of the basket. The basket also needed a handle and a bunny wouldn't be a bunny without its fluffy tail. So I simply glued a cotton wool at the back of the basket. And all I had left to do was to fill the basket with pastel shredded paper and chocolate eggs (without forgetting a few chicks!).
 

 

 

HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!

Mother's day

I know, I know.. I should have posted this weeks ago but I got caught up. Mother's Day was on March 10th and this is what we did with the children

 

First, using wooden beads and plain pasta, the children made a cute neckalce for their mams.

 

 

I had gathered tuna tins and got the children to clip wooden pegs all around. They added a few gemstones on the top of each peg. I had bought a cute fabric ribbon at Home Focus which said "Made with Love" and I decided to use it as a finish touch. I am disappointed as I didn't get a better picture of the end result but I can tell you that the kids were extrememly proud of their little "pot" as they called them. They used it to hold the necklace they had made when they offered it to their mams!!

 

 

 

 

Hope you all like it!